Twitter Takes on the World: 140 Characters at a Time

Originally published in the Britannica Book of the Year. Presented as archival content. Learn more.

This article was originally published in the Britannica Book of the Year, an annual print publication that
provides an overview of the year’s most-notable people and events.
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The question “Do you Twitter?” was asked throughout 2009 by users of the Web’s most popular microblogging service. Whereas a traditional Web log, or blog, might be updated with long entries once or twice a day, a Twitter user might post dozens of short messages of up to 140 characters—called “tweets”—in the same period. In addition to this aspect of the service, which worked in some ways like an Internet or mobile telephoneinstant messaging client, Twitter incorporated features of traditional social networking Web sites, such as MySpace and Facebook. Twitter users (alternatively called Twitterers, Tweeters, or simply Twits) could elect to receive the tweets of other posters or track specific topics, creating a dialogue of sorts and potentially pushing the number of “followers” in a given Twitter feed into the millions. In April 2009 actor Ashton Kutcher made the news when he became the first Twitterer to collect more than a million followers.

While the service itself made headlines throughout the year, its users made their own, transforming Twitter from something that was regarded as an idle hobby for an increasingly wired world into an up-to-the-second news outlet that transcended political borders. On January 15, commuter ferry passenger Janis Krums broke the story of the successful water landing of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River when he sent out a tweet stating that his ferry was going to rescue people from the downed plane. Krums’s hastily snapped camera-phone image of passengers disembarking the half-submerged aircraft was uploaded to Twitpic.com, a photo-hosting service for Twitter users; the site promptly crashed as thousands of Twitterers attempted to view it. Twitterers scored another scoop in June when National Basketball Association star Shaquille O’Neal learned of his trade from the Phoenix Suns to the Cleveland Cavaliers via tweet. Although celebrity accounts tended to attract hackers interested in little more than sophisticated pranks, a massive denial-of-service attack in August targeted an economics professor in the republic of Georgia, knocking out the entire site for hours. Millions of users attempted to log into Twitter only to be greeted by the service’s iconic “fail whale”—the image of a cartoon whale being hoisted into the air by a flock of birds, signaling a site outage. In November a NASA “tweetup” saw tweets from 100 lucky Twitterers who were allowed to observe and tweet about the lift-off of the space shuttleAtlantis from the John F. Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. On hand was astronaut Michael Massimino, who posted the first tweet from space during a shuttle mission in May.

Nowhere was Twitter’s role as an emerging outlet for the dissemination of information more apparent than during the events surrounding the Iranian election in June 2009. As state media sources reported that Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had secured an easy victory, supporters of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi took to the streets in a series of increasingly violent demonstrations. The topic known as #IranElection became one of the most followed on Twitter as Mousavi supporters coordinated protests and posted live updates of events throughout Tehran. On June 15, three days after the election, Twitter delayed a 90-minute maintenance period at the request of the U.S. State Department, rescheduling it for 1:30 am Tehran time in order to avoid interfering with the flow of information within and from Iran. The following day foreign journalists were banned from covering opposition rallies, and Twitter, along with other social networking sites, filled the void left by the traditional media. Government security officers tried to stanch the flow of information by blocking the Web site, while opposition supporters urged #IranElection followers to change their profile settings to the Tehran time zone in an attempt to overwhelm government filters. Events reached a fever pitch following the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan as she was leaving a protest on June 20. A mobile phone video of the young woman’s graphic death was posted on the YouTube video-sharing Web site, and by the following day “Neda” was both the rallying cry of the opposition and one of the top trending topics on Twitter.

The creators of Twitter—social media entrepreneurEvan Williams, social networking expert Christopher Isaac (“Biz”) Stone, and messaging-software engineer Jack Dorsey—did not envision such a paradigm shift when they first designed and launched the service in 2006. From its inception, Twitter was primarily a free short messaging service (SMS) with a social networking element. As such, it lacked the clear revenue stream that one could find on sites that derived income from advertising or membership fees. With the number of unique visitors increasing some 1,300% in 2009, it was clear that Twitter was more than a niche curiosity, though it was as yet unclear if Twitter could achieve financial independence from its venture-capital investors (there was speculation that the company might eventually issue public shares). In July the Twitter site was revamped to put a greater emphasis on its expanding role as a source for “what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.” As Stone publicly acknowledged later in the year, Twitter had “long outgrown the concept of personal status updates.” Meanwhile, Twitter remained focused on the essentials: improving site stability; introducing new features such as search, list, and an optional geolocator tag; and ensuring that its tens of millions of users could continue to live the tweet life.